Images of Air and Light: The Moving Image and the Camera as a Scaling and Analytical Instrument"
The transdisciplinary research project Luftbilder/Lichtbilder (Images of Air and Light) looks at the moving picture as an epistemic medium and examines it with reference to the history of media and science, also taking in artistic and technical aspects. “Scientific” moving pictures are taken to mean films created by researchers to allow their peers to analyse processes of motion and, in their capacity as inscriptions (Latour/Woolgar), to perform an epistemic role. One of the ideas put forward by the project is that we are in the middle of an upheaval of media systems to which the established scientific publication channels have not yet responded in an adequate fashion.
The project takes the wind tunnel as its starting point. This laboratory, which can boast unrivalled stability down the years – the Soufflerie d’Eiffel, Eiffel’s 1912 wind tunnel, is still being used for tests – enables the history of filmed measurements and the cameras used to be studied against a virtually unchanging background.
The project is divided into two major sub-projects (moving picture research, a moving picture atlas) and one minor one (the future of moving pictures).